Tom Kacich | UI women's basketball pioneer: ‘Somebody had to be the foundation’

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Susan Bonner said her cellphone “blew up” earlier this week with reports that former University of Iowa basketball star Caitlin Clark had signed a contract with Nike worth $28 million, a deal that included her own signature shoe.

“Everyone was talking and texting about it,” she said. “It was fantastic.”

Clark recently was the No. 1 pick of the WNBA draft after leading Iowa to its second consecutive national title game, a contest witnessed by a crowd of 18,300 where secondary market tickets went for more than $2,300 apiece. Television ratings for the championship game were greater than for the men’s championship a day later, with an average of 18.9 million viewers and a peak of 24.1 million.

It wasn’t just Clark and Iowa. At the University of Illinois, per-game home attendance grew three times from two years ago (3,720 per game). Attendance and television ratings for women’s basketball were up around the nation.

For Susan Bonner, who played basketball at Illinois nearly 50 years ago, the disparity — and the growth in women’s basketball — could not be greater.

“I look at it as we helped to get it where it is today. Somebody had to start. Somebody had to be the foundation,” said Bonner, whose name was Sue Boner during her playing days from 1975 to 1978.

It was a rickety, underfunded foundation. In 1973, the first year of women’s sports at the UI, the entire women’s athletics budget was $14,164. Men’s programs got more than $2 million. When Bonner began playing as a sophomore in 1975, her coach was Steve Douglas, a former basketball player at Kansas State who was a full-time professor of political science at Illinois. He was paid $1,000 more to be the part-time women’s basketball coach.

“His wife and daughters would be at the games, handing out the programs,” Bonner recalled.

When Douglas left the program after two years, he was replaced by Carla Thompson, who had been a tennis coach and had no basketball credentials. By the time she left after three years, her salary was $5,900 for what was still just a part-time position.

“We rode to all of our games in a big orange van. The coaches had to drive. We only went as far as we could travel in those things,” Bonner said.

They played only nearby teams: George Williams, Purdue, Indiana State, Danville Junior College, Illinois Central College, UIC, Chicago State, Indiana, Western Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois State, Northern Illinois, Ball State and the like.

“We used to sleep four to a room,” she said. “We never flew or even took a bus. The places we stayed were all fleabag hotels. They weren’t even inside rooms. It was the old style where you went in from the outside. I remember when we went to Central Michigan for a tournament, we stayed in a scary place. It was not nice, but it was the budget we had.

“I don’t think we had a director of basketball operations like they do now. It was just ‘This is what you’re doing,’ ‘This is where you go’ and ‘Have a good time.’ We didn’t question it because we were playing basketball and that’s what we loved.”

It wasn’t much better on campus. The players got one pair of basketball shoes for the entire season. The only perk of being a varsity player — one free ticket to each Illini home football game — was taken away after a year. Their games were never on radio or television. Attendance at games was seldom more than 400 except when the women played before men’s games and crowds would build as the game progressed.

“We were allowed to go to the Varsity I Room (at Memorial Stadium) for meals, but we never got to go to dinner because we had to practice while dinner was taking place,” Bonner remembered. “The men practiced from 4 to 6 and we practiced from 6 to 8 during dinner.

“My junior year, I ate mini ravioli out of the can every night when I went home and studied. My senior year too. That’s what we did to survive. That’s a standing joke now, because I still eat mini ravioli. That’s what’s so wild about it. Not out of the can. I heat it up now.”

Bonner isn’t resentful about what she had to endure or what today’s players get.

“It sounds archaic now, but at the time, it was new and different and exciting that we got to play and be a part of something,” she said. “I probably only really knew how fortunate I was after I retired (from teaching and coaching at Oak Forest High School), and I’d walk into someplace like Memorial Stadium or the Assembly Hall and just see all the stuff. It makes you proud that you are a part of that, that you had a chance to play for your school. It’s something I’m very passionate about.”

And later, when she became athletic director at Oak Forest, she applied lessons learned at Illinois to her administrative style.

“Even when I was assistant AD, I told the athletic director that I wanted to do all the scheduling. I wanted to make all the games (for girls and boys) because I wanted to make sure there was parity,” said Bonner, who taught English, was a dean and coached basketball, track and field, volleyball and cross country. She is a member of the Illinois Athletic Directors Association Hall of Fame. “I fought really hard to make sure our girls got to play on Friday nights instead of just Tuesday and Thursday because I didn’t think it was fair that the girls should be out on two school nights and the boys just one. I thought there should be parity.

“And when the boys were on the road, I thought the girls should be home. It was little things like that, just trying to make it equal. Practice times? The boys don’t always get the big gym. The girls and boys shared it.”

Clearly, there was sexual discrimination against women’s sports at Illinois in the 1970s. A lawsuit filed by two female athletes against the university in 1975 was settled out of court two years later, with pledges of additional funding for women’s teams and coaches.

“I think that at the beginning, they thought that (women’s athletics) was a phase and that it was going to fade out,” Bonner said. “The men in charge at that time — Cecil Coleman was athletic director, and I wouldn’t have known him to save my soul because I don’t think he ever came to a game — they just didn’t want to be bothered. To them, we were like little gnats, just something you swat at and maybe you’ll go away.”

The changes in women’s athletics — and in the funding of women’s athletics — are remarkable, Bonner said. The Illinois basketball program, for example, spent $6 million last year. Coach Shauna Green has a base salary of $800,000 annually, slightly more than Steve Douglas’ $1,000 (which would be worth about $6,000 today).

“They have a full-out commitment to win games now,” said Bonner, who is president of the Courtsiders, the support group for women’s basketball at Illinois. “Here they are now chartering flights (for the women’s team). They don’t give them any guff about how many flights they can charter, whereas seven years ago, it was a budget issue. The women get to fly like the men. That’s huge.

“Normally, Iowa is a bus trip. They let them fly to Iowa this year. They should. The men get to do it. The women should too.”

Even after the discrimination and injustices of 45-plus years ago, Bonner said she’s proud to have been a basketball pioneer at Illinois.

“There were a lot of win-wins being an athlete and having the opportunities we had even though people today think we got cheated,” she said. “Sometimes I agree we got cheated, but we made the most of what we had. And it was fun. It was a positive thing to have that opportunity and then to do more of it to get involved in teaching and coaching and spreading what I had learned to other women of today.”